Do you feel sometimes as though you are in an uncomfortable relationship with you body? Perhaps it is not the good friend and companion you’d like it to be. We often don’t pay much attention to our bodies until they are painful. Doing sports, exercise, yoga or pilates are great ways to come into deeper connection with our bodies and how they feel, but how we approach these activities is important. Sometimes we want to make our bodies do something. This desire for mastery becomes a desire to conquer rather than cooperate with our bodies. The results are often predictable — torn or sprained ligaments, pulled muscles, a variety of chronic injuries. Sometimes injuries are the result of cumulative action, such as slumping in front of the computer, repetive stress from performing the same actions thousands of times, and we just ignore that nagging pain, that ache that comes and goes until it becomes constant. These results are the body’s way of trying to communicate with us. We didn’t pay attention to the smaller signals, so we suffer the consequences, until we learn to listen better.

Time alone will heal most injuries, but if we continue to act in the same way, we will reap the same results. In order to gain an increase in function, we need to have a better relationship with our bodies. We need to become better integrated, both in the sense of better integration of the parts of the physical structure, as well as integration of the mind and the body. Rolfing manipulation can help to release scar tissue and restricted physical mobility, and Rolfing movement education can help create a new relationship between your thinking and moving, new ways of moving as well as new ways of relating to your body. Learning to listen to your body’s messages will help you to avoid future pain and injury, as well as to live with greater comfort, ease, flexibility, increased energy, and the joy that comes with noticing how well your body does every day, and not just the times when it is painful.

I am a Certified Advanced Rolfer, trained at the Rolf Institute in Boulder Colorado. (See the links page for directions to the Rolf Institute website.) My experience of being Rolfed while attending college was transformative in a number of ways, and combined , Reichian and bioenergetic therapy, was my introduction to conscious embodiment. I trained as a Rolfer in 1997, and have had hundreds of hours of continuing education in Rolfing subjects as well as visceral manipulation. I am also a certified craniosacral therapist.